Greece Bans Denials of Armenian Genocide

Armenia on September 9 got a gift from Greece — a law making it a crime to deny that the World-War-I slaughter of ethnic Armenians in Ottoman Turkey amounts to genocide. Needless to say, thanks already have been expressed.

The measure comes as part of a new anti-hate-crime law that applies similar penalties for rebuttals of the Holocaust and other war-crimes. The law also toughens punishments for racially and sexually motivated hate-crimes.

Greece ranks as the third country after Switzerland and Slovakia to criminalize claims that the slaughter, which Turkey downplays as one of many atrocities of World War I, ranks as a genocide. In 2012, France, home to a large Armenian Diaspora, adopted a similar bill, which strained relations with Turkey before being overturned by the French Constitutional Court.

Ankara, which is playing its cards warily with Armenia in the run-up to the 2015 centennial anniversary of the massacre, does not appear yet to have responded to Athens’ criminalization vote.

The two “brothers” are not generally quiet on such matters; the Azerbaijani government, for instance, stepped up to the plate for Turkey on France’s genocide-denial decision.

If it does choose to speak up in this latest case, Baku, arguably, could grab some Greek ears.

Last year, the state-run regional energy player SOCAR (State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic) purchased a 66-percent stake in the government-controlled gas-distribution network DESFA; the aim, as Natural Gas Europe wrote, is for Greece to become “ a spring board for [SOCAR’s] expansion further into Southeast Europe” via the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.
The gas will come courtesy of that conduit of choice, Turkey.

Nothing, as yet, suggests that Baku plans to use this energy-card to pressure or reprimand Athens over the genocide-denial bill. But it does, in theory, give Azerbaijan a potentially influential hand to play.